The tradition of slaughtering animal meat goes back thousands of years. Many cultures developed special customs surrounding the butchering and storing of precious meat for the winter days. The customs extended into the serving of special holiday meats, such as the Christmas ham, set aside at the yearly slaughter festival.
In modern times, meat processing plants provide a year round source for fresh meat while eliminating the hunting, cleaning, and storing work involved in bringing the meat to the table for consumers.
Inherent in the mass processing of animal meats are problems related to quality. For example, speeding up a production line can present problems when automated tools are not adjusted to meet the dimensional requirements of individual carcasses. Having an individual manually handle each butchering step is costly and inefficient.
For example, manual removal of animal heads requires separating the head from the atlas joint, and is performed by a butcher. The operation of manually separating the head from the atlas joint is difficult and physically taxing due to the amount of force required to separate the head from the neck.
In an effort to speed up production various systems have been developed for automatically removing the head from the hog using a downward force. Examples can be seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,990,126; 4,158,903; and 4,092,762 to Ochylski. Alternatively, a hog head can be removed using a vertical force as discussed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,994,908 to Fill. These automated methods completely remove the animal head from the carcass. Such methods, however, leave bone chips, presenting a quality control problem.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,139,457 to Rankin et al. provides an apparatus wherein the head of a carcass is pulled to spread the atlas joint before cutting. Proof of the neck stretching is provided by a reaction sensor. U.S. Pat. No. 6,776,701 discusses an apparatus for removing a partially severed head from a hog using a pivot saw assembly.
However, all of the known automated systems fail to maximize the meat available using a quality cutting without bone chips while minimizing the cost of the head removal step in the butchering process.